Thursday, August 15, 2013

Monk in our sphere

By Chet Williamson

It’s been rumored among local jazz fans for years that the late-great pianist Thelonious Sphere Monk flipped one of his many
hats here in Worcester. It was actually in Grafton.

In 1964, TIME magazine
under the headline: Thelonious Monk: “Pretty Butterfly” reported that, “In
Boston Thelonious Monk once wandered around the airport until the police
picked him up and took him to Grafton State Hospital for a week’s observation.
He was quickly released without strings, and the experience persuaded him never
to go out on the road alone again.”

Martin Williams further
chronicled the incident in Esquire magazine.
“In the spring of 1959, he was booked for a week at Boston’s Storyville. He had been up for some three days
and nights without sleep. When he arrived, he came to the desk of the Copley
Square Hotel, where Storyville is located, with a glass of liquor in his hand
after flitting around the lobby rather disconcertingly, examining the walls.”

Storyville was a club
inside the Copley. It was first opened in 1950 by the famed impresario and
founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, George Wein. The hotel is still
there on the corner of Exeter Street and Huntington Ave., Boston. Wein was forced to move the club
out of the hotel for a time, only to return in 1953 with Charlie
Parker featuring young trumpeter Herb Pomeroy playing its grand
opening.

“The room sat just under 200
people, banquet style,” Wein recalled in his memoir, Myself Among Others.
Adding, “There wasn’t a bad seat in the house.”

For 10 years -- the club
closed in 1960 — everybody who was anybody in jazz at the time, played
Storyville, including the great Monk. Here’s how Wein describes him: “Webster’s Dictionary gives eight
different definitions of the word ‘genius.’ The one that applies to Thelonious Monk reads,
“an exceptional natural capacity of intellect especially as shown in creative
and original work in science, art, music, etc., e.g. the genius of Mozart.’

Charlie Parker and Monk

"There's no question that Thelonious fits this definition. I believe his schizophrenia kept him from realizing the full potential of his enormous creativity."

The long feature on Monk in TIME appeared
in the February 28, 1964. The piece was
written by Barry Farrell and called The Loneliest Monk. In the section titled, “Pretty Butterfly,” he writes, “At the piano, Monk is clearly
tending to business, but once he steps away from it, people begin to wonder.
Aside from his hat and the incessant shuffle of his feet, he looks like a
perfectly normal neurotic. “Solid!” and “All reet!” are about all he will say
in the gravelly sigh that serves as his voice, but his friends attribute great
spiritual strength to him. Aware of his power over people, Monk is
enormously selfish in the use of it. Passive, poutish moods sweep over him as
he shuffles about, looking away, a member of the race of strangers.

“Every day is a brand-new
pharmaceutical event for Monk: alcohol, Dexedrine, sleeping potions,
whatever is at hand, charge through his bloodstream in baffling combinations. Predictably, Monk is highly unpredictable. When gay, he is gentle and
blithe to such a degree that he takes to dancing on the sidewalks, buying
extravagant gifts for anyone who comes to mind, playing his heart out. One day
last fall he swept into his brother’s apartment to dance before a full-length
mirror so he could admire his collard-leaf boutonniere; he left without a word.
“Hey!” he will call out. “Butterflies faster than birds? Must be, ’cause with
all the birds on the scene up in my neighborhood, there’s this butterfly, and
he flies any way he wanna. Yeah. Black and yellow butterfly. Pretty butterfly.”
At such times, he seems a very happy man."

The article was originally
scheduled to appear in the November 1963 issue, but was bumped. It was the time
of JFK’s assassination.

Farrell writes candidly about
Monk’s demons. He continues: “At other times he appears merely mad. He has
periods of acute disconnection in which he falls totally mute. He stays up for
days on end, prowling around desperately in his rooms, troubling his friends,
playing the piano as if jazz were a wearying curse. In Boston Monk once
wandered around the airport until the police picked him up and took him to GraftonStateHospital for a week’s observation.

Copley Square, circa 1950s

“Much of the confusion about
the state of Monk’s mind is simply the effect of Monkish humor. He has a
great reputation in the jazz world as a master of the “put-on,” a mildly cruel
art invented by hipsters as a means of toying with squares. Monk is proud of
his skill. “When anybody says something that’s a drag,” he says, “I just say
something that’s a bigger drag. Ain’t nobody can beat me at it either. I’ve had
plenty of practice.” Lately, though, Monk has been more mannerly and conventional.

“He says he hates the ‘mad
genius’ legend he has lived with for 20 years, though he’s beginning to wonder
politely about the ‘genius’ part. By his own admission, Wein had little
recollection of the musical comings and goings at Storyville in the late 1950s.
Between his trips to Europe and increasing festival responsibilities, he was just
too busy.

“But I remember well the
Storyville debut of the Thelonious Monk quartet in the spring of 1959,” he
says. “I had worked with Monk at Newport in 1955 and 1958, but had no personal
relationship at this time. So I didn’t know what to make of it when Thelonious
came to Boston in an agitated state.”

Though he doesn’t name the
personnel, the quartet in ’59 was most likely saxophonist Charlie Rouse,
bassist John Ore and drummer Frankie Dunlop. By the way, check
out footage of Monk’s performance in the film, Jazz on a Summer’s Day.

Picking up the story at
Storyville, Wein says, “I wasn’t there when he arrived at the Copley Square
Hotel and was refused a room; he had alarmed the hotel staff by scrutinizing
the lobby walls, with a glass of liquor in one hand.

“The first set that night was
scheduled for 8
o’clock. Thelonious didn’t
show up until 10. The fact that the audience stayed put for two solid hours
without complaint amazed me. They had such love for the music of Monk that they
were willing to sit patiently, even though it was entirely possible that their
man might not even make the gig.”

Williams reports that after
Monk was refused a room, he declined to take another at the Hotel
Bostonian where his sidemen were staying. In his account of the 10 o’clock arrival, Williams states, “The room was nearly full
of expectant but patient people. He played two numbers, and came off. At 11:30 p.m., he played the same two numbers, sat motionless at
the piano for what seemed like half an hour. His bewildered sidemen had left
the stand after about eight minutes.”

Here’s Wein’s account: “When
Thelonious did arrive, he went straight to the bandstand, where his sidemen
were waiting. He played two songs, then walked off and wandered aimlessly
around the room, picking imaginary flies off the walls. The audience watched
him in silent bewilderment. I got him to return to the stage at 11:30, and he played the same two songs again. Then he sat
at the piano without moving for some time. His bandmates eventually left the
stand. I had no idea what to do. I had tried talking to Monk, with no response.
After what seemed to be an eternity, Thelonious stood up from the piano,
shuffled around for a few minutes, and left the club."

George Wein

Williams says Monk was
obviously disturbed about the hotel situation. He finally registered at the
Bostonian, but didn’t like the room and left. He then tried the Statler but was
refused a room so he took a cab to the airport. “Planes, however, were no
longer running, and he was picked up by a state trooper to whom he would not or
could not communicate,” Williams says.

Monk finally revealed
who he was, but it was too late. The trooper took him to GraftonStateHospital for observation.

Grafton State Hospital

GraftonStateHospital was first opened in 1901 as a farm colony of the InsaneHospital in Worcester. In 1912 it separated from Worcester to become its own entity. The patient population hit
its peak in 1952 with 23,000 people. It closed in 1973. The Mental Health
Commissioner Milton Greenblatt at the time said the decision to close the
Grafton facility, which had more than 1,000 acres of land and 50 buildings, was
due to the deteriorating condition of the physical plant. He also said that “our
hospitals still have too many in-patients who could be out-patients if
supporting services were available to them. Massachusetts cannot afford the human or financial costs of
institutionalizing people who would be better off at home.”

These days the state-own land
is the home of the TuftsUniversityVeterinarySchool and a variety of social agencies. There are also
more than 1,000 nameless grave sites on the property.

Wein says when Monk was
picked up by police and taken to the hospital, he knew nothing of it, “however,
when I called both his manager, Harry Colomby, and Nellie Monk [wife]
the following morning to ask whether Monk had gone back to New York, they
realized that his whereabouts where unknown and they grew frantic. Harry hired
a private detective, who questioned Boston’s Finest (but not the state police).”

“He was lost there for a
week,” Williams says. “No one knew what had happened to him. The local Boston police were checked, but no one thought of trying the
state police. A letter the hospital claims it sent to Nellie Monk
never arrived. By accident, an acquaintance in Boston heard mention of Monk’s whereabouts on a local TV
show. Nellie rushed to Massachusetts and secured his release. There had been no grounds on which he could
be held. “It was the combination,” a friend later speculated, “of exhaustion
after several days without sleep and the fact that he disconnected at first,
and that he was away from New York
and Nellie.”

Nellie and Thelonious

In typical Monkian
eccentricity, the composer turned the episode around and used it as a
certification of his sanity. “I can’t be crazy,” he said with conviction, “cause
they had me in one of those places and they let me go.”

Monk died on February 17, 1982. His life, in all of its ugly/beauty, mysterious/majesty, and tortured/brilliance, is there in the music. Listen.

·Sections of this
article first appeared in Worcester Magazine.

Note: This is a work in
progress. Comments, corrections, and suggestions are always welcome at: walnutharmonicas@gmail.com. Also see: www.worcestersongs.blogspot.com Thank you.